Nona Fernández talks to Josh Weeks

Chilean actress, screenwriter and award-winning novelist Nona Fernández talks about the themes of historical memory and the haunting legacy of Chile’s political past explored in her work.

Fernández’s most recent novels, Space Invaders, Chilean Electric and The Twilight Zone include stories of families affected by the years of Pinochet dictatorship. They include dreams of children who witnessed the dictatorship, families affected by the darkness of the Pinochet era when people went missing, were murdered or hanged, and a secret service agent who confesses to his crimes of torture. The novels explore themes of recovering memories from the oblivion of history, resisting repressive regimes and who gets to shape the truth. Fernandez’s latest book is a memoir, Voyager: Constellations of Memory, in which she weaves together stories of her mother’s brain illness with stories of the cosmos and of her own country.

Fernández won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for a book written in Spanish by a female writer for The Twilight Zone. She describes herself as ‘Actress for fun. Narrator for being a nuisance, trying not to forget what should not be forgotten. Scriptwriter for soap operas because of necessity. An uncomfortable Chilean, and sometimes rabid’. Here she talks to Josh Weeks, a postdoctoral fellow in languages of the future at University College London whose research interests include modern Latin American fiction.

Part of the festival’s Spanish and Latin American proghramme.